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Matthew 28:8 has the women run from the tomb 'with fear and great joy' to bring the disciples word. Luke 24:8-9 has them return from the tomb and tell the eleven and all the rest. Mark 16:8 — the original ending of Mark — has the women flee the tomb, tremble, and 'say nothing to any man, for they were afraid.' Matthew and Luke: immediate proclamation. Mark: shocked silence.
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Cited passages
They departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to bring his disciples word.
They remembered his words, returned from the tomb, and told all these things to the eleven and to all the rest.
Cited passages
They went out, and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had come on them. They said nothing to anyone; for they were afraid.
Notes on manuscript readings that bear on this passage — where the surviving witnesses differ over what the text says. Presented for transparency as the textual critic’s description, not as GEBible’s conclusion about the tension.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
This contradiction depends on a textual fact that critical scholarship treats as settled: the original Gospel of Mark ends at 16:8 with the women fleeing the tomb in silence — *kai oudeni ouden eipan, ephobounto gar*, 'and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.' Matthew 28:8 instead has them run 'with fear and great joy … to bring his disciples word,' and Luke 24:9 has them return and 'tell all these things to the eleven and to all the rest.' Immediate proclamation in two gospels; shocked silence in the third.
The textual evidence for Mark's silence-ending is among the strongest in New Testament criticism. Mark 16:9-20, the 'Longer Ending,' is absent from the two great fourth-century uncials, Codex Sinaiticus (ℵ) and Codex Vaticanus (B), and from the Sinaitic Syriac and important Armenian and Georgian witnesses. Eusebius (Ad Marinum) and Jerome both report that the most accurate Greek copies known to them ended at 16:8. Beyond the Longer Ending there exists a separate 'Shorter Ending' and a 'Freer Logion' interpolated within the Longer Ending in Codex Washingtonianus — a proliferation of competing conclusions that is itself the clearest evidence the church found 16:8 unbearable and repeatedly tried to mend it. Bruce Metzger's *Textual Commentary* and the NA28 apparatus print 16:9-20 as secondary, and the judgment runs unbroken from Westcott and Hort through to the present editors. The vocabulary and style of 16:9-20 also diverge markedly from Markan usage, reinforcing the verdict.
With the secondary endings set aside, Mark closes on dread. The apologetic harmonization, run by John Wenham and given qualified room by D. A. Carson, reads *oudeni* as restricted: the women said nothing *to anyone they met on the road*, while still eventually delivering the message to the eleven. The strongest form of this case appeals to Mark's habit of recording commands to silence (the 'messianic secret,' e.g. Mark 1:44; 7:36) and argues the silence is momentary and en route. But the Greek resists it. The construction *oudeni ouden eipan* is an emphatic double negative — 'they said nothing to no one,' i.e. absolutely nothing to anyone — and the clause is closed by *ephobounto gar*, an explanatory 'for they were afraid' that grounds the whole silence in fear, not a temporary travel-restriction. Adela Yarbro Collins in the Hermeneia Mark and Joel Marcus in the Anchor Yale Mark both reject the restricted reading: grammatically the silence is unqualified, and the sentence is built to end the book on it. The much-debated fact that the gospel terminates on the postpositive conjunction *gar* — rare but not unparalleled in Greek — only underscores the abruptness.
Why would Mark end this way? The leading critical explanations, developed by Norman Petersen and John Dominic Crossan, read the silence as a deliberate literary and theological device: the narrative breaks off mid-action, throwing the burden of proclamation onto the reader and implicating even the last faithful witnesses in the failure that has dogged the disciples throughout the gospel. Matthew and Luke, writing later and using Mark as a source, found this catechetically intolerable and rewrote the women's response into joyful obedient testimony. Bart Ehrman and Metzger present Mark 16:8 as a textbook case of later evangelists smoothing a theologically awkward Markan ending, and the church's own manufacture of multiple substitute endings shows the ancient readers understood 16:8 exactly as the critics do — as an ending that needed fixing.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction, anchored in a secure text-critical result; the restricted-silence harmonization is grammatically untenable.
Sources for this reading